2025 MCPP Winner

Johanna Ng

a woman wearing a choker is walking in a crowd, 2024
inkjet print on cotton rag, inkjet print on clear film 80.5 x 59.4 cm

This work traces the parallel erasure of Asian identities in computer vision and network television. I began by taking screenshots every time an Asian body would appear in Sex and the City. These screenshots were photographed into new compositions, recentering Asian extras in SATC’s periphery. These new compositions were fed through Google’s text-to-image and then image-to-text AI engines. Ultimately, an image of an Asian woman becomes “a woman” and “a woman” conjures the image of a white one.

The adjudicators also nominated four Highly Commended entries:

Antares also Highly Commended two other artworks:

Miho Watanabe

Awareness of Between-ness: A Day After My Father’s Departure – Self-Portrait in His Room on His Chair, 2025
phototransfer on silk with small amount of violet acrylic layer 59 x 42 x 1 cm

I am a Sydney-based Japanese-Australian artist exploring "Between-ness" – the unseen, reciprocal space between subject, camera, and artist. This self-portrait, taken the day after my father passed, reflects on memory, grief, and impermanence. Transferred onto silk using a phototransfer technique, the image will gradually fade, mirroring how memory dissolves with time and evoking the quiet passage between presence and absence.

Mungo Howard

Studio Window, 2025
acrylic, binder, inkjet toner and paper on hessian 179 x 119 x 3.5 cm

A photographic transfer print of my own studio window, implicitly a kind of self portrait. The 1:1 scale and grids of both the depicted and real surface muddy the distinctions between sculpture and photography. A dusty, translucent window surface makes analogy to the medium of glass and shadows and nods to one of its earliest examples – Fox Talbot’s Window at Lacock Abbey, but here it is reversed – looking into an artificial light, not outwards to the sun.

MCPP 2025 Finalists

Ali Tahayori

History repeats itself, 2025
UV print on glass, hand-cut glass, silicone on aluminium 85 x 65 x 4 cm

'History repeats itself' is an image of my maternal ancestor. The archival photograph has been printed on glass, broken, and then reassembled to reflect the word "History". Using glass instead of paper as a foundation to reveal the visual content references wet plate negatives in the history of photography, where they were used for "sharper" images. Similar to a broken mirror, the reflective broken glass returns the viewer's gaze, reflecting on history and memory through a queer diasporic lens.
Ali Tahayori History repeats itself Ali Tahayori History repeats itself
Angus Brown

Torqued Image Object 1, 2024
pearl-finished silver gelatin print mounted on rolled aluminium sheet 126 x 92 x 20 cm

In an effort to stretch the conventions of image-making outside the flat pictorial plane, I employ the operations of sculpture into the field of photography. In search of a material line of connection, I found a shared reliance on metals can act as common ground between disciplines, and assist in collapsing the distance between their expanded fields. Maintaining the logic of image making, whilst speaking the language of sculpture, these blended outcomes have come to be known as ‘image-object
Angus Brown Torqued Image Object 1 Angus Brown Torqued Image Object 1
Annabelle McEwen

Reflected Gesticulation, 2024
aluminium and polyepoxide mounted on aluminium, image transfer on cotton, hand-stitched frame, eyelets and twisted shackles 49 x 42.5 x 2 cm

I recorded my body’s gestures via iPhone time-lapse, creating blurred visual data. I superimposed images of three surveilled movements, processed the digital file into a 3D model, then cast it in aluminium and polyepoxide via silicone moulds. The work is framed with hand-sewn fabric and image transfers. It explores the surveilled, mediated body, blending topographic language with the aesthetics of surveillance, cartography, and CCTV.
Callan Skimin

Ext. Day., 2025
scanned photomontage, inkjet print on Imperial Satin paper 84.1 x 59.4 cm

As a collector of images, there is always separation from the photographs I arrange. Distance becomes the thematic drive of the work – I find myself arranging scenes in which I am an uninvited spectator. Correlations hint at poetic narratives, but the material’s anonymity always leaves unanswered questions. Scanning extends the separation a level further. Ink dots and paper fibres reveal the corporeal life of mechanically reproduced images, which runs parallel to implied narratives of the whole.
Callan Skimin Ext. Day. Callan Skimin Ext. Day.
carolyn craig

Re/mediate, 2024
screen-printed charcoal dust on paper (Arches) 60 x 45 cm

Contemporary society distances itself from the spectral shadow of superstition and ritual yet we continue to demarcate subjects based on primal ideas of filth and contagion. Subjects of low capital value are relationally soiled whilst high value persons are associated with purity and hygiene. My personal history follows me in life like a spectral cloud of dust – it hovers over opportunity with abjection. I use this dust to produce a photo screenprint cleaning with the broom of my mother.
Carolyn Craig Re mediate Carolyn Craig Re mediate
Claire Paul

Entangled, 2024
charcoal and ash screenprinted onto handmade paper (recycled artworks, turmeric, rainwater and foraged plant matter from site) 54 x 48 cm

'Entangled' is a photographic portrait of place which invites the environment to become an active collaborator. Rejecting contemporary hyperactivity, a pinhole photograph was slowly captured over 60 seconds before being developed in caffenol and rainwater, then fixed with saltwater. The image was screen-printed with charcoal from the site onto paper handmade from recycled artworks, ocean water, turmeric, and foraged plant matter. 'Entangled' seeks to promote a more mindful presence where observation and grounding are found and fostered.
Claire Paul Entangled Claire Paul Entangled
Claudia Nicholson

Primera Comunión, 2024
archival pigment print 50 x 82 cm

'Primera Comunión' is an exploration of memory and the struggle against forgetting – in both conscious and unconscious terms. The context for my politics of memory is living in Australia, having been adopted from Colombia. In 2011, I collected a found VHS home video of a group of girls taking their first communion. I photographed this video and rephotographed it again. 'Primera Comunión' positions transubstantiation as akin to the experience adoption; an imperceptible moment of radical transformation
Claudia Nicholson Primera Comunion Claudia Nicholson Primera Comunion
Darron Davies

The Self and the Others, 2025
photograph on photo rag 80 x 64 cm

A uranium glass butter dish was left on photopaper for two weeks in a photographic black bag and then processed in the darkroom. The resulting central image is one created without external light. The light came from within. This is a metaphor for the emerging self. The surrounding family images, plus my own photography, have mysterious codes that counterplay with this central image; there is always a curious and ineffable relationship between the self, others and one's past.
Darron Davies The Self and the Others Darron Davies The Self and the Others
David Rosetzky

Between Wakefulness and Sleep, 2024
archival pigment print 62.5 x 41 cm

'Between Wakefulness and Sleep' explores gender identity and dream states through a double exposure photograph of a naked male torso holding a shell. Evoking classical forms and surrealism, the work uses experimental analogue film processes to blur boundaries of body, desire, and self. It embraces non-heteronormative ambiguity, offering resistance to cultural norms through a poetic approach to photography and the imaging of layered perception
Dylan Marriott

Red Chandelier, 2024
C-type print on aluminium 120 x 200 cm

My images are made with a constant acknowledgement of apparatus and environment, using digital and analogue methods of photographing and printing. Created through feeling; by walking, looking, and searching for objects and situations that are common or uncommon to me, 'Red Chandelier' was made in response to the confusion of perception. I utilised multiple processes, each being vital to the colour, tone and presence of the finished artwork
Dylan Marriott Red Chandelier Dylan Marriott Red Chandelier
George Angelovski

CRITICAL DREAMS . I . (eye), 2024
opalotype, four colour carbon transfer (with carbon dioxide ink) 15 x 10 cm

Anchored in this series, Martin Opitz's Alexandrine technique helps me describe a photograph. The proceeding poem reflects my sensations similarly taken from real life and real place: splendid isolation in singapore and in oz, light proof Bag mysteriously gain'd consciousness, when cutting fingers oBfuscate a flash of light, light dipped in CO2 ink IQ's strategy, giving opalescence colour life like colours, sculptural form material intensity, complex laBour intensive of tonal control.
Hilary Wardhaugh

Dad's Last Swim, 2024
digitised lumen prints, diptych 25 x 42 cm

My dad died in 2017. Since then, his ashes have been kept in a cupboard in our Mum’s bedroom until last year when we scattered his ashes at his favourite beach where we had spent our holidays as a family. Before scattering them into the waves I made a lumen 'portrait' of him using his ashes. I then washed the paper in the sea leaving sand where his ashes had lain. I always remember Dad being sandy and salty at the beach after swimming. For permanency I re-photographed each result.
Hilary Wardhaugh Dad s Last Swim Hilary Wardhaugh Dad s Last Swim
Isabella Capezio

Decoy, Casuarina, 2024
C-type print on metallic paper, custom painted artist frame 144 x 96 cm

This unique C-type print is part of a series of three photoprints that use light to imprint traces of Australian native plants onto metallic paper. Rather than picturing space through the camera apparatus, the photoprint is a multiple exposure with different light filtrations of cyan, magenta, and yellow creating different dimensions and forms from their cross overs and from their absences.
Isabella Capezio Decoy Casuarina Isabella Capezio Decoy Casuarina
Izabela Pluta

Cavitation (darkroom study), 2025
C-type print on gloss paper, acrylic face mount 200 x 125 cm

I stage the darkroom as a dive site: standing between enlarger and C-type paper, my body cavitates the beam, bending light as water does. The resulting photogram aims to mirror submersion – refracted colour scrambles depth, weightlessness disorients perception. The process records my negotiation with unstable visibility and shifting space, aligning the embodied adjustments of diving and darkroom practice.
Jeremy Drape

Untitled (Shade Cloth), 2024
gelatin silver print 16 x 16.5 cm

'Untitled (Shade Cloth)' is a study of surface as a register of time and perception. Part of my ongoing series On Land, it centres on a torn, weathered shade cloth – suspended between utility and collapse. In its compromised state, it speaks to impermanence and quiet endurance. I aim to invite a slower kind of looking: not to resolve or interpret, but to remain – to engage with what so often slips just outside the frame of attention.
Jeremy Drape Untitled Shade Cloth Jeremy Drape Untitled Shade Cloth
Jessie Turner

The Sting of Immortality, 2024
metallic inkjet print 91 x 61 cm

'The Sting of Immortality' depicts an Australian bluebottle on a gold hexagonal mirror, referencing the mirrors that make up the James Webb telescope and the history of animals in space. The contrast of the ocean as the originator of life, and space as a symbol of death interplays with the image of the immortal jellyfish staring into the viewers eyes to create a haunting depiction of the price of everlasting life.
Jessie Turner The Sting of Immortality Jessie Turner The Sting of Immortality
Johanna Ng

a woman wearing a choker is walking in a crowd, 2024
inkjet print on cotton rag, inkjet print on clear film 80.5 x 59.4 cm

This work traces the parallel erasure of Asian identities in computer vision and network television. I began by taking screenshots every time an Asian body would appear in Sex and the City. These screenshots were photographed into new compositions, recentering Asian extras in SATC’s periphery. These new compositions were fed through Google’s text-to-image and then image-to-text AI engines. Ultimately, an image of an Asian woman becomes “a woman” and “a woman” conjures the image of a white one.
Julie Purdie

As far as the eye can see, 2025
archival inkjet print on cotton rag, from an Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) B-scan 100 x 100 cm

This enlarged OCT scan of a retina with geographic atrophy reimagines vision loss as a mountainous landscape. From a distance, sighted viewers may perceive abstract terrain, but for those with central vision loss, the image dissolves into a grey void. This work invites reflection on perception, absence, and the unseen worlds shaped by vision loss.
Julie Purdie As far as the eye can see Julie Purdie As far as the eye can see
Justine Roche

A Faceted Unknown, 2025
wet plate collodion on glass 29.5 x 4.5 x 24 cm

'A Faceted Unknown' commemorates the psyche of wetlands as protectors of the earth in a climate-challenged era. The three-panelled glasswork alludes to the nuanced perceptions of these transitory lands and explores the space between the material and the indefinable. Shifting light transforms the reception of the work as the imagery wavers between clarity and uncertainty. Blue glass is used as a reference to blue carbon, a term for the effective storage of carbon in coastal wetland
Justine Roche A Faceted Unknown Justine Roche A Faceted Unknown
Kathy Mackey

Body Drawing 5, 2025
digital photographic print on Hahnemühle photo rag paper 90 x 90 cm

In this work, I continue to explore similarities and differences between analogue and digital mark making using paper, light and the human form.
I am interested in how the gesture of the limbs of the body become part of drawn imaginary landscape.
This research manipulates the original artworks through folding and lighting around the body – harnessing shadows and refractions onto the human skin which add more sculptural elements to the original drawings.
Kathy Mackey Body Drawing 5 Kathy Mackey Body Drawing 5
Lilah Benetti

Trace Elements, 2024
medium format analogue photograph hand-printed on cyanotype (sun-exposed photographic print) on 100% cotton rag 35 x 32 cm

Down by fishermen’s bay at Divinity Mosque in Senegal, during a research residency tracing ancestral connections to my Indigenous African heritage. A catch! A quiet gesture from a young boy, layered with cultural survival, inherited knowledge and the growing ecological impact of overfishing on traditional life. Hand-printed as a cyanotype on cotton rag during a residency in the UK, holding the ocean’s deep blue and the trace elements of history, labour, and loss carried through water and memory.
Lilah Benetti Trace Elements Lilah Benetti Trace Elements
Lisa STONHAM

Interior Fragments, 2024
transparent print mounted to acrylic, painted timber 61 x 61 x 1.5 cm

'Interior Fragment' choreographs three shafts of light, captured over nine months, into a single image. Working with light over time, I traced the sun’s movement through interior space, revealing temporal rhythms shaped by natural cycles and weather. Light became both subject and structuring force, authoring angles, reflections, and shadows. Presented as a reflective acrylic screen, it mirrors the present and filters the world in red, evoking the darkroom’s controlled conditions for seeing.
Lisa Stonham Interior Fragments Lisa Stonham Interior Fragments
Miho Watanabe

Awareness of Between-ness: A Day After My Father’s Departure – Self-Portrait in His Room on His Chair, 2025
phototransfer on silk with small amount of violet acrylic layer 59 x 42 x 1 cm

I am a Sydney-based Japanese-Australian artist exploring "Between-ness" – the unseen, reciprocal space between subject, camera, and artist. This self-portrait, taken the day after my father passed, reflects on memory, grief, and impermanence. Transferred onto silk using a phototransfer technique, the image will gradually fade, mirroring how memory dissolves with time and evoking the quiet passage between presence and absence.
Minami Ivory

Would I ever recognise him, or would a different sense betray his presence?, 2025
chemigrams on photographic paper 27 x 24 cm

From the series Weapon of Choice, this work challenges the systematic abuse of women in Japanese society through revisiting a summer of violence that I endured at the age of 14.
The images are representations of living with trauma: of moving between resisting and remembering. Chemicals have been used as olfactory triggers and manipulated with visual elements to express fragmented memories representing the summer of 2001.
Despite my efforts, this predator's face remains elusive.
Mungo Howard

Studio Window, 2025
acrylic, binder, inkjet toner and paper on hessian 179 x 119 x 3.5 cm

A photographic transfer print of my own studio window, implicitly a kind of self portrait. The 1:1 scale and grids of both the depicted and real surface muddy the distinctions between sculpture and photography. A dusty, translucent window surface makes analogy to the medium of glass and shadows and nods to one of its earliest examples – Fox Talbot’s Window at Lacock Abbey, but here it is reversed – looking into an artificial light, not outwards to the sun.
Mungo Howard Studio Window Mungo Howard Studio Window
Nicholas Hubicki

United (Omen), 2024
inkjet print on archival rag with custom timber frame and museum glass 80 x 63 x 2 cm

The copse of she-oaks still stands despite the bushfires that swept through Gariwerd – 135,800 hectares would be burnt over the 2025 summer, although the copse remained. Yet the 4x5 negative had already been consumed by fire and solvents the previous winter, interred in burnt earth and ash, already a fever dream of what was to occur: a talisman, an omen
Nicholas Hubicki United Omen Nicholas Hubicki United Omen
Shea Kirk

Warwick Gow and their Besser Blocks (left and right view), 2024
pigment print on cotton rag 104 x 168 x 4 cm

Vantages is an ongoing stereoscopic portrait series shot using dual large-format cameras. Two images of the sitter from different perspectives are simultaneously exposed onto separate sheets of black-and-white film. The slow methodical process enables an intimate exchange, highlighting the agency between photographer and subject. Allowing space for people to be themselves, the dual-imaging process avoids reducing the sitter to a single vantage point, and instead records them as a wh
Skye Wagner

To, Too, Two, 2025
UV sublimation printing on aluminium, polyptych 30 x 200 cm

'To, Too, Two' is a sequence of photographs created through a layered process of assemblage and (re)photography. I build sculptural forms from objects and cut-up printed images (both found and shot), then photograph these constructions. This method enables me to transmute familiar photographic subjects – food, body parts, animals and products – into strange associative figurations that play against categorical distinction. In this work pinboards were used as armature to stage the image-making process.
Skye Wagner To Too Two Skye Wagner To Too Two
Tamara Voninski

Chemo Decay: Sun Ritual, 2025
photographic lightbox 42 x 59.4 x 10 cm

I exposed images from my chemotherapy induced dreams to the same chemo cancer drugs that drip into my veins during treatment. The chemo serendipitously transforms the photographic material in a Petri dish over weeks. Chemotherapy alters everything in our body and rearranges DNA. This metamorphosis killing cancer and our healthy cells is symbolised in the alteration of a spiritual meditation in a forest faraway.
Tamara Voninski Chemo Decay Sun Ritual Tamara Voninski Chemo Decay Sun Ritual
Yvette Hamilton

Things I Can't See From Places I Can't Be (Elizabeth Fulhame) #1-6, 2024
gold-toned salt prints on cotton rag (unique prints) 59 x 43 cm

18th century chemist Elizabeth Fulhame’s experiments with light-sensitive metals helped lay the groundwork for photography, yet she remains overlooked and no images of her exist. In response, I made AI images of her and printed them via historical salt printing – the process most aligned to her work. This series combines AI images of Fulhame with conventional photos of me printing these images – an embodied feminist revisioning of early and late photography in concept and materiality.